Van Gogh and You Tube

Ok, those two things really don’t go together, but, they’re both on my mind right now. Yesterday, and this is my reason for not posting last night, we went to the Kyshyu National Museum and saw the Van Gogh exhibition. Lovely. Really lovely. Beautiful paintings. But, oh my God were there a lot of people. Traffic getting into the museum was backed up and it took us almost two hours just to get into the exhibition. Totally worth it. Loved it. But, wow.

Anyway, something that came up this week in class was using TV to study English. Here’s a place where the Internet can really help you. Many TV shows, or at least clips of the TV shows, can be found on Youtube. Or, you can head over to your local video store and rent an episode. That actually might work better since you can watch it on your DVD player and not have to hunt though the Internet to find what you want. The other nice thing you can find on the Internet is the transcripts for many, many TV shows. For example, using our Prison Break example, you could search for “Prison Break Season 1 Transcripts” and you would find Twiz TV’s Prison Break Transcripts. From there, you can find the transcript of the episode that you are watching.

The other nice thing about using DVD’s is you can select the subtitle language. Instead of having Japanese run across the bottom of your TV screen, why not change it to English? See if you can understand the scene without any Japanese first. Of course, you can always switch back to Japanese if you need help.

You’re probably going to have to watch a scene a few times to get the meaning. TV shows are often very fast and the dialogue (speaking) is sometimes not very clear. That’s ok. Going back over a scene a few times is fine.